Playful, formal, satirical and tender, the poems in The Fabulanarchist Luxury Uprising are wildly wide-ranging. Jack Houston whisks the reader through meditations on family life, the teachings of Lucretius, the sexual potential of Captain Barnacles, and dreams of a socialist utopia, managing to be both deeply weird and touching.
In his debut pamphlet, Houston draws out and scrutinises the mundanities of life, showing how they can form part of something much bigger. His poems aim to awaken the capacity for revolution within us all, even if it only gets us as far as the roundabout in the local playpark.
"In the year 2121, we're all now too aware that a sofa is simply a bench

constructed from the hewn corpse

of a tree, covered in a mesh made from the amniotic fibres

of oppressedly mono-cropped cotton plants

& filled with the plumage

from many a murdered full-grown duck [...]"

- from 'Utopia'

Jack Houston is a writer and public librarian from London. His poetry has been shortlisted for the 2017 Basil Bunting and 2018 Keats-Shelley Prizes, and has appeared in publications including Blackbox Manifold, Magma, The Morning Star, The Rialto, Poetry London and Stand. His short fiction was shortlisted for the 2020 Brick Lane Bookshop Prize and the 2020 BBC National Short Story Award. He lives in Hackney with his partner and their three children, two goldfish and a stick insect.